Summary

We started this chapter by enumerating a number of things that simply cannot be done without a proper data provider. To overcome these limitations, we decided to provide ourselves with a DBMS engine and a persistent database for reading and/or writing data. To avoid messing with what we did in the previous chapters, we created a brand-new web application project to deal with that, which we called WorldCities.

Then, we chose a suitable data source for our new project: a list of world cities and countries that we could download for free in a handy MS Excel file.

Right after that, we moved on to the data model: Entity Framework Core seemed an obvious choice to get what we wanted, so we added its relevant packages to our project. We briefly enumerated the available data modeling approaches and resorted to using Code-First due to its flexibility.

Once done, we created our two entities, City and Country, both of which are based on the data source values we had to store...